707: The Playbook for Better Decisions in Busy Seasons with Brian Hurtak
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Pet Sitters International- Visit https://www.petsit.com/psc
What do you do when your business feels like chaos is calling all the plays? Brian Hurtak shares how overwhelmed professionals can borrow practical tools from football coaches to make better decisions in high-pressure moments. Brian explains the difference between ethos, a playbook, and a play sheet, and why clarity about who you are has to come before productivity systems. They also discuss how to organize what you learn, reduce cognitive overload, and build simple routines for making adjustments over time. This conversation is a helpful framework for pet care business owners who want to stop collecting ideas and start actually using them.
Main topics:
Managing chaos with systems
Ethos as decision filter
Building a personal playbook
Using a practical play sheet
Making ongoing adjustments intentionally
Main takeaway: “You can be anything, but not everything.”
Brian Hurtak reminds us that clarity is one of the most important tools we have when life and business start to feel overloaded. We do not need more random information piled on top of our stress. We need a better way to filter what matters, organize what we learn, and actually apply it. If you have been feeling stretched thin, scattered, or stuck in reaction mode, this conversation will help you think about your next steps with more intention.
About our guest:
Brian Hurtak is a corporate executive, speaker, and author of The Play Sheet: A Simple Resource for Overloaded Professionals. Drawing from nearly two decades of leadership experience in large organizations, he helps people organize information, reduce overwhelm, and make better decisions under pressure. His work adapts lessons from football coaching into practical tools for leadership, parenting, and personal growth. Brian is passionate about helping professionals create systems that lead to greater clarity and more effective action.
Links:
Email Brian: myplaysheet@gmail.com
Brian’s official website is The Play Sheet, where he shares speaking, consulting, and templates. https://myplaysheet.com
His book is The Play Sheet: A Simple Resource for Overloaded Professionals. https://amzn.to/43VEToQ
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Pet Sitter Confessional, its hosts, or sponsors. We interview individuals based on their experience and expertise within the pet care industry. Any statements made outside of this platform, or unrelated to the topic discussed, are solely the responsibility of the guest.
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Collin Funkhouser 0:02
Welcome back to Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Today, we're brought to you by our friends at Pet Perennials and Pet Sitters International. Managing the chaos and overwhelm in business is seemingly a never-ending process, and there's always something more, which leads to struggles in business, and leads to, you know, less productivity, and we just run into a lot of things in business. And so today I'm really excited to have Brian Hurtak, executive and author of the play sheet, on the show. And I actually had the pleasure of watching Brian speak at the Texas Pet Series Association this year, was a real, real pleasure and real treat. And so I'm excited to have Brian on the show to talk about what we can do about this in our business. So, Brian, it's an absolute pleasure. For those who aren't familiar with you, could you please just tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?
Brian Hurtak 0:54
Yeah, Collin, happy to do so. Also, thank you so much for having me on the show, and it was an absolute honor to be at the Texas Pet Sitters Conference. I got to give a quick shout out to Kathy, you, Indiana. You all put on an amazing couple day conference every year. I'm a little sad. This year it was an awesome last year, y'all did it on a cruise, so although it was a great conference this year, next year you got to, you got to let me, let me attend the one on the cruise ship, but honestly, you all have a great community, and as a pet lover, as a dog owner, I'm really thankful for all the work that you do, and honored to be here to help some of your listeners today. My name is, as Collin said, is Brian Hurtak, and so I'm just your, I'm your average guy, I'm middle aged, I've been a corporate executive for almost 20 years at large financial institutions, Fortune 100 companies. I'm a husband, more importantly, I'm a father of a seven and an eight year old, and like many people for many years, I just was trying to get a little bit better, either personally or professionally, but I really, really struggled to do it, and then you know one day I kind of had an epiphany watching a football game, and it led me on a journey that I never expected to start to apply some things that football coaches do on every sideline every weekend, and it then led me to write a book about it, and that's the play sheet, and what I came and spoke at the conference about, and happy to dive into the concept today.
Collin Funkhouser 2:27
So, before we move any further, I know we do have lots of sports fans and football fans specifically, so we can divide some lines here. Who are your teams?
Brian Hurtak 2:37
Yeah, so I live here in San Antonio, Texas, these days, but I'm originally from South Florida, so I'm a Miami Hurricanes fan. So they had a really good run this year. I'm a Miami Dolphins fan, and then I went to two universities, one for undergrad and one for grad, so Valdosta State University in southern Georgia. I could give a shout out to my Blazers, and then also I was a graduate assistant and worked in the athletic department of the Georgia Tech at Georgia Tech for the Yellow Jackets, and so those are some of the teams that I root for every Saturday and Sunday in the fall and winter,
Collin Funkhouser 3:12
and so the hate mail can be sent to which admin, I'm kidding, yeah, if you
Brian Hurtak 3:16
are no offense to the Bulldogs or anybody out there, but if you're no, there's some teams out there that you know, I think that's one of the greatest things about sports is that you got your rivalries, and especially in college football, it's really fun, but you know, one of the greatest things I learned, and the greatest things here, is that when I got to meet a lot of coaches, and I interviewed a lot of high school coaches too, you really start to appreciate what these coaches and these programs do every week. I know there's a lot of news and a lot of stories out there with paying players, those types of things these days, but man, those are the big dogs, right? But some of the stories behind the scenes of how some of these leaders at these universities or schools, and some of them are just high schools, was probably the best part of this journey, as well.
Collin Funkhouser 4:02
Well, I'd say in your study, in your work on this, you really want and want people to focus on character first, in understanding that character. In your book, you talk about being ethos. Why is that so important for people to start with?
Brian Hurtak 4:17
Yeah, so it wasn't something I expected when I went into the book, I actually went into the book to write about the play sheet. So, just for context, to get started here, my book is really about a simple resource that every coach at every level on every sideline uses, which is that laminated sheet of paper that you see them covering their mouth on. And when I went to go interview coaches, I started to see a trend of what they would talk about, and there was really four things, and it was ethos, their playbook, their play sheet, and how they make adjustments, so those are the four quarters of the book, we can, we can talk about those here as well, but every coach told me to. Slow down to speed up, and not jump right into the play sheet. They asked and said, you know what, everything starts with character, and everything starts with culture. And when they said the word character, they often refer to the word ethos, which is from Aristotle's book of rhetoric, ethos, pathos, logos, and it is about the identity of that organization, and why they started with it, really goes to the root cause of the problem that I was trying to solve, and I think many of your listeners are probably trying to solve, which is information overload, or scientifically called cognitive load. We just have too much information that prevents our ability to actually process the information and effectively apply it, and I can, we can dig into that for sure. And what coaches did is they said we can't overwhelm our players, we can't be everything to everybody, we have to pick who we are, and so they would start with what's our identity, and so many of these coaches, when they would join a program, or, or, or try to rebuild a program, the first thing they would ask themselves is, Who are we, and who do we want to be, and that kind of set the shadow, or the law of the lid, of every decision they make, every hire they make every play they add to their playbook, and everything they do, and there's countless examples of where these coaches had these physical, not physical, but actually they would create designs or logos that would represent the identity of these organizations or these teams, and that everybody would line their mission, their core values, their character to, and it become part of the community, be part of the team, and everything. So, really, what it did is ethos created the ultimate filter for what they would actually spend their time on and what they would not, probably more importantly, what they would not spend their time on
Collin Funkhouser 7:02
it, really. Does what you're finding there is that clarity of what am I? What am I? You talk about time, but it's also just resources in general. It's my, yes, my time. It's also my money. It's also my worry. It's also my calendar space. It's also all this stuff gets tied up into it, and if we, what you're talking, so really, if that misalignment exists, well, then you've got all that other extra stuff that you're dealing with that you really shouldn't be dealing with in the first place.
Brian Hurtak 7:29
Yeah, Collin. So, the epiphany I talk about in the book I shared at your conference is that I had one of those moments on Sunday where I was just, you know, no matter how many books I read, how many podcasts I listened to, conferences I went to, mentors I had, if I was being really honest with myself, I was never effectively applying the information that I spent all that time, energy, and money learning, right, kind of exactly what you just said, and I had this epiphany on my couch one day, where it was, I just had my calendar open, I was preparing for the work week ahead, you know, my house is kind of a disaster of things I needed to do, my kids' toys were everywhere, I had paper scattered, preparing for some meetings that week, and I really, in that moment, was overwhelmed, overloaded, and stressed in the work week had not even begun, and that's when I saw a coach on the on the screen holding this eight by 11 laminated sheet of paper, and it, it hit me that coaches had created a framework for simplifying and creating a cheat sheet for when they have massive amounts of information, a lot of impediments in front of them, think about it, they're on the sideline, there may be 80 100,000 people on the stands for these games, the clock's ticking down, the pressure to keep these jobs is very, very high, and they have to look at the formation, they have to assess the situation, and they have to make a call within a matter of three to five seconds and relay it to an 18 to 24 year old on the field in college, basically like think about what they have to do in that moment, and the play sheet was that at a glance cheat sheet that basically distilled all the great information they had already learned, already practiced, already studied for years, but it was relevant to that game. They were prepared, and they glance at it, make the call. They'd assess the formation, glance at their play sheet, make the call. And so, in that moment, I realized every coach is using one of these, and I went to study coaches, and what I found is what coaches were overcoming what I was overcoming was cognitive load, and cognitive load. I just give you the five bullets here. Is ultimately people have too much information. We have many sources of information, right? You also have too much of that information. It still. Difficult to manage that information most of the time, that information is irrelevant, and like everything, there's just not enough time to process it. So, as we try to do our best to get better, like I did, at being a better dad, a better husband, a better professional, a better pet sitter, you go learn a lot of information, but if you don't have a framework to organize it, recall it, and apply it, it'll actually have a law of diminishing returns, and most likely, if you're listening to this, ask yourself what information that you went and proactively sought out over the last year, two years, three years, have you actually applied, and that's where this book, I think, can help you a lot.
Collin Funkhouser 10:43
Yeah, that's a definitely a difficult question to be faced with, because many of us do, we do pride ourselves in, oh, continuing education, and I have this certification, and I have this license, and I have this, and I have that, but what has it, what you're really asking here is, like, not just are you applying it, but how has it impacted you? Are you allowed it to do something and change what you are doing, because you can go to all the conferences in the world, read all the books in the world, listen to all the podcasts in the world, get all the coaching in the world, and have it all written down in little notebooks. I'm a notebook guy, I have about seven within reach of me right now. Don't judge me, Brian, they all go to notebooks, and, and you know, there is that question of, hey, if you went through all that effort, shouldn't it do something for you on the other end, and you talk, you know, about the having that set north star, that mission, that ethos, why do we struggle with knowing who we are and what we want at the, you know, ultimately, because many of us start off the day going, yeah, oh, I definitely, I think I know where I'm going. Why, why is it important to actually reset and course correct in that moment?
Brian Hurtak 11:53
Yeah, I think the why is probably different for everybody, but I can tell you what happened to me, I was probably more clear in my early 20s, right, coming out of school of who I wanted to be, but then life happens for many of us, and look, you're all your listeners are probably entrepreneurs or running their own business, and so look, as we get older, we have more responsibilities, we have more, maybe we're married, maybe we have children, we have more financial challenges. Our parents are getting older, we're taking care of our parents, and their.. and sometimes their health issues.. we may have our own health issues, and over time it just starts to snowball, and I think we find ourselves waking up one day and say, I don't know how I got here, but I want to get better, right, and so I think just life happens is ultimately what overwhelms people, and we don't set routines like these coaches do, and ask ourselves that important question of who we are and who we want to be, like many of these coaches are hired to turn a program around, like I gave, I give examples many times, but think about a coach that joins a new organization or new team, they're brought there because the team's not performing, and when they get there, many times they see that the team is kind of like this hodgepodge of players and coaches and approaches and philosophies over many, many years, and they get there, and, like, we're a jack of all trades, right? We don't really know who we want to be, and so, in the book, I offer some guidance on this first chapter. I say, put down the book and ask yourself, Who are you, and who do you want to be? Write that mission statement. Write that down, and then use it as a filter and lens for every hire you make, every, you know, every client that you book in your situation, every decision that you make, you know, every book that you read, every conference that you go to should align to that North Star, because if it's not, you're going to have too much information, it'll be irrelevant, and you are actually making it more of an impediment to have time to be great at the thing you're ultimately most focused on.
Collin Funkhouser 14:14
Yeah, that that first pass filter is so critical, because you touched on those two that I wanted to talk about, of it's too much or it's irrelevant, and how often am I sitting there going, well, I don't know, is this important to me? Like, when I, when do I find half asking myself that question, I realize maybe when I signed up for this class I should have been asking that question beforehand, maybe before I paid to go to the thing, I should have asked that, or maybe before I did, the I should.. that's my, that's my step zero of, is this important to me? Is this.. does this apply to me? And there is that balance of, well, it might not be important to me now, but maybe later. But I think what you're saying is, well, but if you know by the time it. Is important to you, you'll know it, and it'll, you can access it again there instead of just always preparing for all of the unknowns, which adds so much clutter and so much chaos in our days, because then we're having to do everything all of the time.
Brian Hurtak 15:14
Yeah, you nailed it, Collin. And the quote I love, I say all the time, is from a gentleman named David Al, and he says you can be anything but not everything, and I don't think we have that filter. So this is a slow down to speed a moment. Once again, it was not one I was searching for, but it was one every single coach started with. So it's step one, it's the first chapter, it's the first quarter of the book, it's to find who you are and who you want to be, and that ultimately dovetails into then you build your playbook, right? It basically says, what should I be loading into my playbook, and I'm not wasting time on things that are irrelevant to me, because there's just not enough time to do it.
Collin Funkhouser 16:05
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Brian Hurtak 17:13
Yeah, the playbook was the second thing. I mean, everybody has, like, you hear in corporate America, we hear about playbooks all the time, but I'm going to kind of come at it from a different angle, and why, what is a playbook, and why you need a playbook, like you said, it a second, you have eight notebooks, right? Like, I would find myself as a voracious learner reading a book on executive communication, or time management, or strategic thinking, or, you know, parenting, whatever the concept that I was working on, but that information was everywhere, right? It was highlighted in, like, I say this in conferences, I always see people's faces, like I would read a book and highlight the page so intensely and circle it and star it, and you know, the funny thing, every time I bring somebody on stage in these conferences, they say they star the page on the book, and then you can't see behind me, but I got a shelf of books, and think about me going and getting all that information.
Collin Funkhouser 18:08
Yeah,
Brian Hurtak 18:08
like it doesn't create a very quick way to access it and recall
Speaker 1 18:11
it.
Brian Hurtak 18:12
So I'm just, I'm kind of setting the story there, and then you know, think about it, you have podcasts, you have bookmark, you have notes in your notebook, you have things just mentally that you just hope that you memorize, you have things in your Apple Notes, you have it everywhere, so it's scattered, fragmented, and ultimately it's lost. And then, in the moment that you need it, you have no idea where it is, and you have to go and try and find it, or you paraphrase it, or you don't know. So, what coaches have mastered is that over the course of their career to help them create mobility as they go from one organization to the next to help onboard people very quickly into their organization or onto their team, they basically organize their closet, is what I say, they get the right things into their playbook, so what they do is their philosophies, their strategies, their workout regimens, their nutrition regimens, all of their plays, the list goes on and on. They put them in one central repository, one document. Some of these are three, 400 pages long. I don't want to overwhelm you there, but that's what they are. But it is one place, so when they read a book or they see a good play, they pull that play, put it in there, and the thing that they do is they organize it. Think about chapters of a book. You may have different categories of your playbook: sales plays, marketing plays, how to run your business plays, how to hire the right people plays. They organize those plays so it's easy to access and go get the information when you need it most, and here's the really cool part. When I talk to coaches, and I have a lot of stories here that I share often on these forums, is that coaches often don't need that play today, right? So, when you, you read a really good book, and here's the example I'll give, per. Personally, my kids are seven and eight. I read every parenting book list and every parenting podcast for many years, but my kids were two and three. I kept seeing a lot of content on sibling rivalries that was irrelevant once again when they were two and three.
Collin Funkhouser 20:18
Yeah,
Brian Hurtak 20:19
at seven and eight with a boy and a girl in the backseat of a car on a three hour drive. It is very relevant. If I had to go back five years and go find that information, that's not.. I wasn't organized to do that. The playbook creates a framework where I took that information, I was like, this is interesting, I'm a parent, it's relevant. I put it in my parenting category in my playbook, and now you'll see how I build a play sheet. In a minute, it's ready to go. I can pull it off the shelf whenever I need it, and it's very accessible. And with tools today and technology today, I use OneNote, and there's other forms out there that I can go get that information in a matter of seconds, so the playbook is to recap is one centralized place for all the great learnings that you have over the course of your life or your career in an organized way, so you can easily access it when you need it the most,
Collin Funkhouser 21:20
and again, I think that's why it is so critical to know what our mission is and who we are, because we don't know what the buckets need to be in the playbook unless we know where we're headed, and so what you have here is these big broad categories of basically who you are as a person as you're talking there may be listeners who are thinking, oh, this is this is this like the sops that I write for my employees, or is this like the SOPs that I write for how to do a visit, and it kind of is, but it's like the handbook for you getting stuff done, and you and what and how you're going to operate, and knowing, okay, I'm a business owner, so I'm going to have a business owner category, but within that, I could imagine there's, okay, well, like you said, here's how I do marketing, here's how I do sales, here's what I do, and any, as I'm learning, as I'm getting information, I can put it in each one of those spots, so that when I come up into a situation now, all of a sudden, instead of paging through, I have seven notebooks here, I won't tell you how many are in my closet, but they're all numbered, they're all wonderfully numbered, Brian. So, there's some organization for you, but I'm not having to go, oh, in what was that page, and what did I highlight, and what did I do? And now I'm wasting more time, and I'm more stressed about it, and I just kind of compounds from there,
Brian Hurtak 22:35
100% And look, I spent time several years ago, and in the book, there's three steps to building your playbook: it's inventory, consolidate, and organize, right? So, you got to go inventory the eight notebooks, get them on, get them together. Now, you got to consolidate them into one place, and then you got to organize them into whatever you know categories that you see fit, and I personally use OneNote. Let me explain why. Microsoft OneNote, and you can use your own applications here, but when you digitize it, I can now go in there and search, right? I may like coming into this today. I have a lot of concepts around this book, and based on if I'm doing, you know, I talked to EMT the other night, and I'm talking to Pet Sitters today about the same concept, just different application, but I can go into my playbook, search certain things, and find relevant things in a matter of search, right, and with Copilot today with Microsoft, I can actually ask it to build plays like go search other articles, go find me some more things, and add them to it. And here's the other thing for you, Collin, how many people do you have in your organization? Right, maybe you have two or three or four or five people. Some of the best people, when I do this from larger organizations, like let's use a great sales guy or woman, right? A salesperson, they have all this great knowledge, but most of the time they can't teach it for anything. So, if it's in this playbook, this lifetime of knowledge that they've gained on how to be a great salesperson, they can organize it, and they can give it to that new person joining their organization or their sales team if they become higher in their organization, and that's what coaches do. If I'm a head coach and I hire a coordinator, or I hire, or I recruit a new player, I give them the playbook, and they quickly can go know exactly what I want them to know in a matter of seconds. It'd be pretty overwhelming if you gave that person eight separate books or binders where they can just go to one and learn what's relevant to them based on the categories that are relevant to them versus the broader organization. So organizations do this, and here we connect the dots, organizations. Operationally, as well, on the ethos and playbook, many organizations spend countless time doing strategic planning, that's their ethos. Then their playbook is more their operational plan, right, of what they want to be and how they're going to execute, and getting it in one place. So that's where ethos helps create that filter, once again, of what goes into your playbook,
Collin Funkhouser 25:21
and again, knowing what do I need to do, and sometimes these categories come from what am I, what do I struggle with most, right? Like, I, when I, when it was reading through this, it's like, hey, that if I have a place where I'm just, I don't know, or I feel like I'm always making it up, or I feel like I'm always struggling to find things, maybe I should start with that big bucket of information and start with that area of my life first to get that nailed down, and then find other applications from there.
Brian Hurtak 25:48
So, you're setting me up perfectly. So, thank you. The play sheet, you know, the play sheet is this eight by 11 laminated sheet of paper with an array of colors, it's small print and highlights, and, and once you see it, you'll never not see it again on a sideline, but when I was interviewing all the coaches, I asked them about the process of how they created the play sheet, because I created one for myself, but I didn't really know how to create one, so when I went interviewed all these coaches, that's one of the steps I did, and I met a gentleman by the name of Lincoln Riley, and what I realized, and all the coaches did the same thing here. Lincoln Riley is now the coach of University of Southern California, was the coach of Oklahoma at the time, but really he was no different than 95% of the coaches that I met every week, they have a different opponent, so what they do is they watch film on themselves and on that opponent, and what they do in the watching film is they try to figure out what are the strengths and what are the weaknesses of their opponent, and how do they find mismatches, so that they can find those little advantages, and then based on that, that determines which plays they add to their play sheet. That whole process basically is called a game plan. They build a game plan every week based on the opponent they're facing. So, how does that translate to you and I, Collin, what you need to do once you have your ethos, once you have your playbook, your playbooks ready, it's organized. Now you need to ask yourself the most important question, What am I facing now? What am I facing next 30, maybe 60, or 90 days? Is it a merger and acquisition? Am I a new manager? Am I getting married? Am I having a baby? Am I starting my new business? Do I need to up my clients? Do I need to retain my clients? Like, what? What is it now? And that becomes the filter for what you take from your playbook down to your play sheet. Think about the coach on the sideline, they can't bring the entire playbook, 500 plays, to the to the sideline based on the film that Lincoln Riley and those coaches watch. They take 3040, plays, maybe, and bring them down to their play sheet based on that opponent that week, and so that's what you all need to do for your play sheet. Ask yourself, Who is my opponent? What is the alligator closest to the boat? Right, what is the most important thing that I'm facing? And take the relevant plays from your playbook, pull them down to your play sheet and start implementing them day by day,
Collin Funkhouser 28:45
and I think it's important to note those play sheets, you know, on the sidelines, you know, they're built for on first down, here's things that we do, if I'm third and long, here's things that we can do, if I'm in the back, here's things that I can do, and all those that you're saying, those are designed for the team they're facing, based off the experience and information they're pulling from the playbook. So, for us, okay, my playbook, I'm filling it with all the marketing information, and all of the resources, and all the knowledge that I have in my buckets of marketing and advertising, hiring, growth, sales, leadership, all that stuff's going there. Then, as I'm going, oh, this is my next 90 day marketing push. Let me go into my marketing bucket. Oh, what am I trying to market for? Dog walks. Okay, well, my dog walking stuff. Okay, so that's going to come over here, and I can now start building this plan, and kind of a given this situation, how am I supposed to respond? And I.. and it's this.. what.. what I love about this, Brian, is when we are in those moments, and I know you, you tell a story of Jennifer as well, who kind of struggled with these intensity moments of, you know, overwhelm and things like that, but like in those moments, what's our default? What do we, what are we going to decide, and I can't keep all this information in my head all of the time, so what. I get in front of me to now simplify my decision to make better decisions, faster decisions, and more authentic decisions too.
Brian Hurtak 30:08
Yeah, man, Juan, I love that you're reading it, and it's exactly it. And Jennifer is a great example. I'll give another example I often use is that let's go back to me on my couch overwhelm that day with my calendar open, right, and I look at my calendar, and I look at my work week ahead, and I may have a crucial conversation with a direct report, that's the one I've used a lot recently, because I had this and it really hit me, and I'm going to look at my plays, and I'm going to say, okay, I'm going to build a play sheet that's going to really help me have the right conversation. So, I'm going to take the category of crucial conversations I have, the I have the DVD set behind me here, the whole toolkit behind me, and it was a great, a great set. And I'm going to take those relevant plays and that category, and I'm going to put it down to this laminated sheet of paper, and I'm going to then take five to seven of the main concepts from that book that I really want to apply, and I'm going to write them down, and it's just like five to 10 words with quick triggers, something that's going to remind me of what I want to run in that play, and that's no different than it being first down or goal line, or you know, fourth and long, or whatever the situation, those are the categories for coaches on their play sheet. You've got to ask yourself, what are those categories? So, for me, in that situation, it was I want to build, bring a category of crucial conversations, and I am introverted, I mean, I'm extroverted, this person's ex introverted, and I really wanted to be able to have a very poignant, very concise, impactful conversation with this person. So, I pulled down the relevant plays, and I put it on my play sheet that week, and then I went into the meeting, and I had my play sheet with me, and right before I got the meeting, I glanced down at it, and I remembered, okay, I want to have this conversation differently than I would naturally have it, and here are the concepts that I want to run, and I looked at it, glanced up, assessed the situation, and I ran the play way better than I would have if I didn't have that. I do that with parenting in the house all the time, when, when my kids have undue attention, I have a parenting category on my play sheet right now, and it's like, really, it's all about when they're showing emotions, one of them's undue attention. When, when I'm giving attention to one versus the other, my natural reactions to get mad, that's not going to work. So, it gives me the plays that I want to run, I glance at it, and what I run isn't what I would probably have done, and so I'm very intentional of running the right play in the right moment, and I think what it does is it gives us the ability to actually apply what you spent all that time, energy, and money learning that you wrote in your notebook, Collin, like you spent time to write in your notebook, but did it goes back to scattered, fragmented, lost, did you actually apply it? And the whole thing about the play sheet is laminate it, put it on your computer screen, use it, and as you, that's what coaches have it on the sideline, they use it in practice in a game all week, and as they use it, guess what happens, they get better at the play week over week. So we can talk about that, that leads to adjustments as well, is that you're not going to run the play perfectly in week one, or the first time you run it. I may have really jumbled that conversation with that direct report, but every conversation after that, I was probably a little bit better at how effective I was at a crucial conversation.
Collin Funkhouser 33:48
Well, again, what you know, you reference a lot of like Covey and David Allen, and David Allen is really big on like productivity in context, for like, where are you working, and let's do stuff that's relevant there at my desk, if I'm at my office, if I'm not working. And what we're doing here is going, hey, there's context for the information that I have in my life. Where do I need to apply that and actually implement that? And, like you said, like you're not going to do that the right way every time. So, what does that feedback process look like, Brian? And how do we make sure that we have a the time to do that review and b are we making those changes to the playbook itself or at the play sheet level. How do we walk that line?
Brian Hurtak 34:32
Yeah, so this is all about adjustments, and the way I would simplify this is the key to adjustments is having simple repeatable processes, right? That's like a like engineering or continuous improvement one on one agile methodologies, all these big corporate jargon words, but having simple repeatable routines for you to reflect on how you're doing. What did I say that Coach Riley does every. Sunday he watches the film,
Collin Funkhouser 35:02
right.
Brian Hurtak 35:03
So there's really two types of cadences that I say, and I'll share how they relate to either the playbook, ethos playbook, or play sheet. The first is at the end of every week, once you establish your play sheet, like use it for a month or two months or three months, right, and actually run the place over and over and over and over, like think about a team week one versus week five versus week 10 versus the end of the season, they run the play a lot better, and because they make minor adjustments on it, right, maybe with different people, maybe at different times, maybe at different situations, but they tweak it, so let's do the same thing, that crucial conversations, I ran it on Tuesday. On Friday, here's what I suggest: I set up time every Friday for myself for 30 minutes, and I just reflect on how did I run those plays. This is a cadence-based routine, so I'm basically watching the film on myself. I also personally have somebody like a peer mentor, just coach me, saying, How did I, how did I run it? It was like clunky, was it? Now I can't do that, maybe in an intimate one on one conversation, but some parts of my, my professional personal development, my wife will be sure to be giving me the feedback, you know, they can, they can say, hey, you could have done it a little bit better, or here's what I think, and so I basically just set Friday routines to see how I'm running the plays on my play sheet, which is the equivalent to a coach watching film on their team after every game, so that's that's one very simple cadence-based routine that I recommend, and then at the end of the day, or at the end of the cycle, what I would say is maybe every 3060 90 days, then you should revisit it, and saying, Okay, how am I performing on that play sheet? Have I mastered some plays? Do I still need to continue to work on plays? And more importantly, you may want to ask yourself, has my game plan changed? Has my opponent changed, and so that doesn't mean you throw the play sheet away. It's just you've used it, you've gotten better at it, and now you're going to create a new play sheet for a new opponent over the next period or cycle that you're in. And so those are cadence-based, and so I recommend Friday for intra, like in the play sheet that you're working, and watch the film on yourself, and then every 3060 or 90 days, you set the routine and ask yourself, is my play sheet still relevant? Do I need to add new plays, remove plays, or maybe change some categories of plays altogether, because my focus or opponent has changed, and all you're doing over that time is making those adjustments, you're tinkering, refining an adjustment, so those are some of the key routines. Now, last thing I'll say, your playbook shouldn't really ever change. What happens is your playbook should just be being added to over time and constantly organized. Your ethos is a different story. Your ethos is really like your five year strategy, 10 year strategy type of thing, but what I do say, and I say in the book, sometimes life does happen, and so situations may change you to refocus, and what's important, you at certain stages, your life or career may really change, so I think over time, like long periods of time, you may want to ask yourself, am I ethos changing? But it really, really shouldn't. So, ultimately, once you build your ethos and your playbook, that's pretty foundational. It shouldn't change. What should change is every 3060, 90 days, based on what is the focus for now, that season of life, that that that alligator closest to the boat, that's when you update and change your play sheet, and that's really where adjustments is mostly focused.
Collin Funkhouser 38:50
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Collin Funkhouser 39:20
Talk to talk about the importance or how to make in-game adjustments, you know, where the coach, that you've, you've practiced, you've, you've rehearsed, you've done, you've got the play sheet in front of you, and it's just not going the way you thought it would, and, and I know, for me, sometimes that's well, that could be because of how I'm handling a situation, right, I'm stressed out, I didn't get enough sleep, and this play sheet in front of me is just not working well. How do you make those more real-time adjustments?
Brian Hurtak 39:50
Yeah, we talk, I talk to the coaches a lot about this, in regards to you, you always hear like halftime adjustments or in-game adjustments, right? Like that's what, and you know. Funny thing is, is that for high school coaches, they don't really make much, you know why? Because these are young kids with still developing brains, and it adds to the information overload
Collin Funkhouser 40:11
for their play, for their team, for their team.
Brian Hurtak 40:14
Yeah, so they've got to be very, very careful not just abandoning the plays in the game plan, because it didn't work out in the first couple moments, but here's how to make the in-game adjustments. Right, build your play sheet and run your play. There's a Joshua four out there, he has mastery of basically of how you effectively turn things into habits, right. It's the, it's the three phases of mastery, is what he talks about, and it's cognitive phase, associative phase, and autonomous phase. And the cognitive phase is like you're learning the play, it's hard, it's clunky, you're going to make mistakes over time, you make fewer mistakes, it's not smooth, but you're improving. But ultimately it becomes like automatic. So what I tell people is that run the plays multiple times and don't quit on them, but spend that Friday for 30 minutes and ask yourself, How did I run it, and how do I personalize it for myself? Because just because some great speaker, some great book, it works, that's probably for the masses, you've got to make it relevant to you, so I think the answer to your question is make it relevant, and so run the play, assess it with that routine every Friday, and saying, did it work, how would I make it right, and keep practicing it. I also tell people, use it in non-risky situations, like compared to my corporate world, I would sit on nonprofit boards, and I try things in some of those other situations, or I do it with friends or other scenarios, and I see if it worked or didn't work, and I get better and better. So, don't quit on your plays on the adjustments. It's not about changing the play, it's about tweaking. What coaches do in game is they move it from the left side of the field to the right side of the field, they may change the person running the play, right, so you're it's not full blown like rip it out of your repertoire, right, it's actually tinkering small minor adaptations that make it relevant to you, that enable you to execute it more effectively, and keep at it, and use it. So, I say, always have the play sheet on you, keep running the plays, run the retrospective every Friday on how you're running it, and over time that skill will go from like from a one to 10, from a two to a four to a six to an eight, and you'll start to master that play, but master in a way that is authentic to you.
Collin Funkhouser 42:46
Well, I like you also give a piece of advice about don't throw away the old copies that made my tendency to hoard information very happy, but but it would be done in an organized way. Don't worry, don't worry, Brian, it would be done, and I think that's another reason why having this in a digital format is so wonderful, because you can go look at version one, 1.1 1.2 1.3 even have I can imagine having descriptions about what the intent was and why they were there and what worked and what didn't, so you're constantly going and pulling back from other experiences and other things, and so over time it just becomes this kind of living document for how you're executing now.
Brian Hurtak 43:25
Yeah, I an example I give is that I had a play sheet when I took over a team in 2018 and it was all about building a high performing team. It was how to be a coach, how to empower, how to build culture, right? It was around how to structure the team correctly, it was how to just listen right. It was all these concepts and categories of plays that were really important to the focus of that stage of my life, was to build a high performing team as a new leader. A really good book that I was leveraging was The First 90 Days from a Harvard Business Review. Like that book was gold for me, for doing this well. I found myself in the same situation again in 2023 I took over a new team and a new company. It was the same situation. Now I may have been a lot more, hopefully more mature and a little bit more tenured in some of the running those plays, but I went and got that play sheet and it was like a memory overload, it was like, man, that worked so good, that didn't work well, right. And so then I just, I slightly adjusted the play sheet, and I ran the same play sheet for the next 3060, 90 days, and I think I built a pretty decent team. It helped me, you know, lead to some, some good things of the team I'm on today. So I really do think that those play sheets don't throw them out, they could be relevant a different season of life.
Collin Funkhouser 44:47
Well, and you're talking about those three stages, once you reach that autonomous stage, I know a lot of people can get stuck there because it's just the old familiar, the old familiar, and that's where I think. The making sure you have that cadence built into the review is so critical, because it's one thing to have mastered a skill set, or have mastered a play sheet, or have mastered these this information, but if you're not checking in, looking for feedback, getting in new things, you're just running kind of blindly at that point, just truly operating without any context or connection to the to reality.
Brian Hurtak 45:29
Yeah, I mean, the great, the great book, in my opinion, there is Atomic Habits, right? He talks about just small, simple bites over time at atomic level, it'll become habitual, right? And that's what you know, going, that's what cognitive to autonomous is, is really the atomic habits, and, but what I say is that there's, there's two things I'll say there, Collin, is one of them is some coaches want to be Hall of Famers versus one and done, right, and so I tell the story all the time in a lot of speeches I do, is that everyone wants to be a success, but not everyone is willing to do what they need to do to achieve it, and that's from Nick Saban, the former coach from Alabama, probably the winningest high school or college football coach in history, and this guy was relentless, he trusts the process, he's run, he'd run the same things year over year, no, how matter he autonomously became, he would continue to run the same place over and over and over and over and over and over again until he completely mastered it and got everybody to master it with him. So, I think you have to ask your class, even though you master play, it doesn't make you a Hall of Famer. You could have one win, but what is the legacy you want to leave? And I think, as you master plays, you need to do that. The other thing from keeping great plays that are that you've mastered on your play sheet is coaches script the first 10 to 20 plays, sometimes of the half. They put the plays in order, like they pregame, right? How they're going to do it, and the reason they do that is for is one reason is to build confidence. So, what I tell people on their play sheet is, have those three or four plays on your play sheet that instill confidence, because there's going to be some new plays that question that confidence when you run it the first time. So, put some plays on there that really put a smile on your face, give you some energy, give you some positive vibes. Put those on your play sheet, in addition to some of those tougher ones that you're a little bit more scared of. So, you know, two things there: one, create some confidence plays that get you going, get you on every time you add a new play sheet that give you a little bit of momentum to get through those hard days of mastering it. And then those plays that you've mastered, don't give up on them, because do you want to be a one and done or Hall of Famer? The times I stopped using this framework, I thought I mastered it. I stopped reading books, I stopped adding to my playbook, I stopped creating play sheets. I can tell you, those were the worst phases of my career, because I wrote, like, literally, I wrote the book on it, I thought I don't need it, and I found myself winging it. I was not intentional, and the moment I stopped being intentional is where I lost it.
Collin Funkhouser 48:14
Well, there's a community aspect to this as well, Brian, where we're not doing this alone, and we're not doing this siloed, right? There are people around us, so would love to hear you talk about the importance of sharing this kind of thing with, with the, with, you know, people, you know, whether it's co-workers or whether it's people in, like, team members, actual team members, or it is, you know, other people in our industry.
Brian Hurtak 48:38
Yeah, so parenting, right? I didn't create this concept, so I owe the people that have read this book that have reached out on this concept, but yeah, crowdsource the information, right? Like, let's, let's do it. So I'll talk about how you can do as pet sitters here in a second, but as a parent, I was building my play sheet, so one day, like, another parent built their play sheet, and she's like, she gave me a place sheet, I was like, oh my goodness, like, these are amazing plays. Can I have these plays? Of course, you can have these plays. We're all in the same struggle here as parents. So this group of parents, group chat, starts sharing a bunch of plays together, and we created our own parenting categories and parenting plays. They would read books, I would read books, we'd add them together. We basically became our own self-help group, right? So, what I tell people at these conferences, like Collin, you all had such a great conference. Three days of information. How many people took great notes and great concepts from that conference? But they took different ones. If you aggregate all those and categorize them, so you all, as a group, as a community of practice, that's a really popular agile principle. And some of the things I do in my day job, a community of practice of sharing those great ideas as pet sitters, as pet business owners share those categories of plays, like put them on your websites. You're only going to rise all boats, you're all in mostly different markets, right? Like, if somebody's doing some great things in Nebraska, share it with somebody in California, it's going to help each other, and you all will start to build. Together, so I really recommend that you all create a shared space where you can say, here's some great concepts and categories of plays that I learned to run an effective business, or be a great pet sitter, or a great walker, and you know, get those out there, share them, and then I think get together every now and again and talk about it, I think those are really, really great additions, and that's what coaches do. They go to coaching conferences, you know, they get together, they share plays, they talk to their peers, and they, they steal plays from one each other all the time.
Collin Funkhouser 50:35
It's always, it, you know, and that it helps so much, because we can only learn at our own pace and I can only have so many experiences, I can only read so fast or listen to so many things, so to have other people who have insights and learning, you know, take that basic principle, let me learn from others, but let me learn how you executed in this situation, an xyz, and if then, let me learn how you handled that, what was the result? Okay, now given what I'm facing, my market, my clients, my team, how do I then take that and turn it into something that's useful for me and that helps speed up that process so much?
Brian Hurtak 51:14
Yeah, that's the, that's the example I gave of the sales guy that had all that intrinsic knowledge that was just in his head, but his team was terrible at performing at sales. Right, last example here is that there was a doctor who was at the basically the last months of his career, and he didn't want all that great knowledge of 50 years or so of learning, and so he dumped it all into this, you know, basically a OneNote, almost writing his memoir, right, dumped all the great learnings, but he then organized it, and guess what, now he, this, this gentleman actually created an AI bot, you know, he can, he can basically of himself, and you can ask it questions, that's his playbook, and over time some of these newer doctors can, that are in his practice, can just say, 'Hey, how would you handle the situation? He put it in his playbook, he put a skin over, which is not to get, you know, overly technology here, but he put an AI, artificial intelligence user interface, like picture of himself or visual of himself, and it can answer those questions of everything he learned over his career, basically coaching his team in perpetuity, even though he may no longer be with the firm or may no longer be with us at a certain point. So you can do the same thing, create those playbooks, share that information, and then it's accessible to anybody. So maybe for the pet sitters, you all just create a bank or playbook of all the great concepts you know, and have people be able to add to it, or accent, and, and hopefully that helps people get better. Then they're going to be at different stages, they'll pull the relevant plays to their play sheet based on what they're facing in that next 3060, 90 days, because it won't be the same for everybody, and that's the difference between the playbook and the play sheet, right there. Right, is that you can have it all crowdsource, get all the information out there, and then, based on what I'm facing, I can pull from it and create my own personalized play sheet for that most focus area of my life right now.
Collin Funkhouser 53:16
Brian, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing this with us and helping us to take action and get out there and actually do the things that we want to and need to be doing without being held back. For those who want to get connected, get a copy of the book and pick your brain on stuff. How best can they do that?
Brian Hurtak 53:35
Yeah, you can visit me at myplay sheet.com We consult, we speak, so reach out to us. I'm happy to help. We have a bunch of templates on the website as well, and I really just want to say thank you to you, Collin. It's been to you, Deanna and Kathy. It's been a great couple weeks to get to see this incredible community of pet sitters. Thank you for all you do for all of our animals out there, and all of our all of us overwhelmed pet parents that are just trying to take care of these great animals that we love so dearly.
Collin Funkhouser 54:06
Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian. Again, thank you for coming on the show today.
Brian Hurtak 54:10
Yeah, thanks for having me, Collin.
Collin Funkhouser 54:12
I love when Brian said that you can be anything but not everything. I think that really hits hard as business owners and entrepreneurs, because we're just trying to do everything all at once, aren't we? And I think Brian reminds us that clarity is one of the most important tools that we have when life and business start to feel overwhelmed, because they will, and they do all of the time. We don't need a more random information just piled on top of our stress, and more and more and more. We really do need a better way to filter out what matters to us and organize what we are taking in, what we're struggling with, so that we can actually apply the lessons later. So, if you. Have been feeling just stretched and scattered or stuck. I hope that you can take a little bit of this conversation today and apply it to where you are. We want to thank our sponsors today, Pet Perennials and PetSers International, for making this show possible, and we really want to thank you so much for listening, we hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and we'll be back again soon.
